Have you heard the new hit, 'Blurred lines'? If you think you haven't heard it, I'm here to say you probably have. These are the songs we do not have a choice of listening to, they lurk in the many settings we find ourselves in and out of everyday. Even if we aren't paying attention we are subconsciously listening. We could all continue to press on and try to avoid its messages and not allow its lack of creativity to inhibit our psyche but unfortunately this is not a possibility. For our psyche is connected to all that is and as much as we deter from these messages they are flowing in and out of those we come across and the ones we love. We are apart of it and it leaves a very uneasy feeling of unsafeness everywhere I go.
Even as I write this in the park, while my roommates playfully practice handstands, I can only think the worst about the group of guys staring at us. Their body language is directed towards us, and they hold their gaze as they talk amongst themselves. The probability of these men hearing this song multiple times this week is high and the probability of them thinking the song is "cool" isn't a far stretch.
This song, like many, fill us with incompetent information about an experience that is sacred, spiritual, expressive, and healing. It turns it into a one way production that burns with demeaning rape messages that tell women not only how we should be treated but implies that men "know we want it" and that men will "give us something big enough to tear our asses in two" because apparently that's what we want. It constructs an idea of how sexual interactions should occur which leads men to feel as if these ways of interacting are not perverse but desired by women. It also seeps into the way women feel about their sexual appearance. Messages like these, displace women's sexual expression and encourage women to do only what is expected by them. We all begin to live the aggressive illusion sung by men who say they are happily married… but are sure they can "liberate us" with their dominance because they know it's "in our nature."
Robin Thicke directly says he takes pleasure in degrading women in this interview and then justifies the song by proclaiming he is happily married with children and that he has always respected women in the past? As if to say, it's okay because he has a wife and every other women he can disrespect now or use to his pleasure, "Yeah, had a bitch, but she ain't as bad as you so hit me up when your passing through". All I got out of reading his interview is that Robin Thicke is an egotistical, sexist asshole that doesn't know what the hell is going on. We are giving him (or who ever wrote the song) control over the tone of our sexual experiences. He is perpetuating our culture's obsession with caging women's desires and diluting mens emotional competency. This is the background music of our lives and I'm sick of it. Fuck that and fuck this song.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/18/robin-thicke-blurred-lines-rapey_n_3461215.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003